The present invention generally relates to admission managing systems, and more particularly to an admission managing system for admitting authorized people into a place of meeting or the like.
In an admission managing system which admits only authorized people into a place of meeting such as university grounds and a meeting hall, each person shows his identification (ID) card which shows his personal identification information. The person is admitted into the place of meeting after it is confirmed that he is one of the authorized people.
However, this method was troublesome and a burden on each authorized person, because he must show his ID card every time he wishes to enter the place of meeting.
In order to eliminate this problem, the use of an integrated circuit (IC) card which stores the ID information of the holder of the IC card has been proposed. The IC card is provided with a memory which stores the ID information and a central processing unit (CPU). The ID information is input to the CPU of the IC card from an external unit via electrode terminals of the IC card, so that this input ID information can be collated with the ID information stored in the memory of the IC card. In addition, it is also possible to rewrite the contents of the memory of the IC card from the external unit. The IC card has a relatively large memory capacity, and the information privacy of the IC card is satisfactory.
However, because the electrode terminals of the IC card must make contact with the external unit such as a card reader in order to exchange information, it was troublesome for the card holder to use the IC card.
In order to eliminate this problem of the IC card and make the card more convenient, a non-contact type IC card has been proposed. The non-contact type IC card is provided with a transponder having an oscillator circuit, an oscillation control circuit and the like which are provided on an IC card body, and information is exchanged between the external unit via the transponder. For example, electromagnetic waves, high-frequency waves, radio frequency (RF) waves, light, electrostatic coupling and the like are used as a data transmission medium, and the ID information is written into and read out from the memory within the non-contact type IC card.
In the case where a microwave is used as the data transmission medium, the ID information is transmitted from the non-contact type IC card in the form of the microwave and received by a terminal equipment which is provided at the entrance. The terminal equipment collates the received ID information with the ID information which is registered for each authorized person, and opens the gate to admit the authorized person into the place of meeting only if the two collated ID information match. As a result, there is an advantage in that the card holder does not need to insert the non-contact type IC card into the card reader, and it is convenient because the card holder may simply keep the non-contact type IC card in his pocket, for example.
However, the conventional non-contact type IC card suffers from the following problem. That is, if a card holder carrying the non-contact type IC card approaches near the terminal equipment, the non-contact type IC card is operated by its own battery in response to an inquiry radio wave which is output from the terminal equipment. Hence, if the card holder stands near the gate for a relatively long time before passing through the gate, the ID information which is returned from the non-contact type IC card is consecutively read by the terminal equipment a plurality of times. For this reason, there was a problem in that the battery of the non-contact type IC card wears out quickly because the terminal equipment operates the non-contact type IC card a plurality of times while the card holder stays near the gate.